In the wake of the dispatch of Anwar Al-Awlaki, former Bush administration legal advisor John B. Bellinger III wonders if Obama’s use of drone strikes could damage him in the way Guantanamo Bay damaged his predecessor, alienating international allies and leaving officials open to prosecution.
The short answer is ‘No’. While he focuses on the finer points of international law and domestic anti-terror legislation, Bellinger overlooks that fact that the opposition to Bush and Guantanamo was primarily driven not by legal concerns but by partisan politics.
There are, I’m sure, many human rights activists out there who are deeply principled, and would oppose drone strikes, indefinite detention, military tribunals and other controversial counter-terrorism measures under any administration. I can see their arguments, although I believe they’re wrong, often dangerously so.
But many more activists in the ‘rights’ industry are first and foremost leftists, who use human rights issues to advance leftist agendas – a fact Bellinger acknowledges when he writes “Human rights advocates, on the other hand, while quiet for several years (perhaps to avoid criticizing the new administration), have grown increasingly uncomfortable with drone attacks.”
Some of the most vociferous opponents of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies were individuals so committed in their opposition to the President – from deranged Code Pinkers to cynical Democrats to the National Security Leaks desk at the New York Times – that they were happy to try and undermine those policies, and weaken their nation’s defences, for political gain.
To appreciate this, you only have to recall the howls of outrage mutterings of mild disappointment from the left when it became clear that Obama was not, after all, going to close Gitmo, nor prosecute CIA operatives accused of involvement in what his Justice Department alleged was the torture of terror suspects.
And principled or not, human rights campaigns are only going to gain traction with coverage in the media; and both the mainstream US and international media, dominated as they are by liberals and leftists, aren’t going to beat up on Obama as they did on Bush (although they might have made a bit of a fuss if his presidency had been going well domestically).
So don’t expect to see activist Spanish judges issuing arrest warrants for Eric Holder or his minions any time soon.
I despise Obama and his political party, but I won’t betray my country (and help terrorists) just to secure political advantage, as Obama and most scumbag lefties/Democrats did when George Bush was president, and neither will most people who share my right wing viewpoints. And, of course, most lefties will side with Obama, no matter what he does, just because he’s a lefty, so there will be no great outrage from that camp.
Targetted killings will continue, and there won’t be any mass demonstrations, or deliberate leaks of sensitive information by the Liberal Stream Media, or anything like that.
Obama already has his Guantanamo. It is [still open] Guantanamo.
You make a number of excellent points, Mike, but one of the most important is this:
“But many more activists in the ‘rights’ industry are first and foremost leftists, who use human rights issues to advance leftist agendas…”
We need to remember that line. Leaders of rights activist organizations are simply running a business, and like any business, they press for decisions and deals that improve their competitive position. It’s less about rights and more about power and profit.
But this isn’t about ‘human rights’. This is about the encroachment of the state on the hard won basic rights of the citizen to defend himself before a jury of his peers against the charges brought against him; to have a jury of his peers decide his guilt or innocence. Instead we are replacing that with unelected government bureaucrats sitting in a closed meeting declaring him guilty, without having to justify their decision to anyone, without a trial, without checks and balances, without giving the accused the right to defend himself. I would think that anyone who has seen how public prosecuters over-reach would be very reluctant to give any government employee the right of life and death.
Who are they going to declare, by government diktat, is ‘at war with the United States’ next? Drug dealers? No need to try them, just put out a hit on them, of course they are guilty. Who else? How about those disloyal Republican SOB’s in Congress who tried to shut down the US government and destroyed our credit rating? How can anyone doubt that they are traitors? Off with their heads.